Kathleen was stabbed to death in a “random” act of violence. She was shopping at Wal-Mart last Sunday when one Luis Rodriguez-Flamenco tried to carjack her. While police and news outlets have repeatedly characterized this crime as a case of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” it was anything but random. Kathleen was selected from a parking lot of potential victims by an armed predator who wanted to steal her car.

Luis Rodriguez-Flamenco

Then he murdered her.

Luis Rodriguez-Flamenco committed his crime in the company of two illegal aliens from Mexico. He is himself an illegal “immigrant.” Doubtless before the crime, Rodriguez-Flamenco and his two cohorts stood in the Wal-Mart parking lot conversing in Spanish and glaring at passers-by.

Any individual who has ever walked by a group of migrant farm or construction workers knows that glare. It is the look of mildly amused contempt, of ill-disguised hostility that characterizes seemingly every loitering knot of illegal aliens everywhere. If you have ever wondered what such men are saying, you need wonder no longer. At least in the case of Kathleen Byham, who doubtless saw the trio before one of their number stabbed her for nothing, the low snatches of Spanish she may have overheard went something like, “What about her?”

Luis Rodriguez-Flamenco and his friends were in this country because we refuse to protect our borders. They were in this country because we refuse to enforce our immigration laws. Our federal government actively fights the implementation and enforcement, at the state level, of legislation targeting illegal aliens. Huge segments of our society whine that a marginalized slave class of illegal aliens, many of them violent criminals, are necessary to our economy because these aliens “do jobs [law-abiding] Americans just won’t do.”

These are not new problems. Except for its peculiar savagery, the murder of Kathleen Byham isn’t even really news. This woman, who was murdered for shopping at Wal-Mart by Spanish-speaking invaders, is simply one of a legion of victims – American citizens who are not safe in their homes, on their streets, or in our stores because we refuse to stop the flood of violent illegal aliens.

Several years ago, the organization U.S. Border Control reported that, according to something called the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., fully 30 percent of the nation’s then 2 million prison inmates were illegal immigrants. Heather MacDonald, in her 2004 report in the City Journal, wasted no time framing the problem.

“Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens,” she wrote. She went on to report that 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (1,200 to 1,500 murders) were for illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens. According to MacDonald, the California Department of Justice has known since 1995 that at least 60 percent of the vicious 18th Street Gang in southern California consisted of illegal aliens.

Speak out about this issue and you will be accused of “racism.” If you oppose the invasion of the United States by hordes of illegal immigrants who feel entitled to the social services we provide and for which they do not pay a dime, you oppose “immigrant rights” and you will be intimidated with threats of violence (or silenced through naked, initiated force).

The federal government has failed to solve this problem on many levels. It has failed to pre-empt the reconquista – the retaking of the southwestern United States by aliens from below the border – by failing to protect our borders. It continues to fail by refusing to support programs that target, identify and imprison or deport illegal aliens who commit violent crimes on U.S. soil. It has further failed by vilifying those who try to defend this nation’s borders and culture.

Illegal aliens in the United States are repeatedly characterized as innocent, hardworking people who just want to find a better life for themselves and their families. The fact that they crawled past barbed wire fences, raped a few ranchers’ wives along the way and now accept under-the-table wages while dodging the beleaguered police forces seeking them on murder charges (who do their jobs at the risk of being imprisoned for trying to enforce the law), is dismissed as irrelevant. Reality does not, after all, fit the narrative our popular media strive so hard to create. Nevertheless, the fact is that, legally and morally, aliens are invaders whose first act on American soil is an illegal one. They are criminals by virtue of their very presence, no matter how many unwanted jobs they supposedly do.

Wouldn’t you pay more for an apple if it meant there were less chance your mother will be raped or stabbed to death in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart? Wouldn’t you pay more for just about any consumer good if there were less chance a store’s employees would be violent felons … and if such higher prices meant there was at least a chance those employees could speak English?

The crimes committed by illegal aliens completely undercut any argument made for the utility of allowing these invaders to remain here. What we have permitted to happen to our porous borders, to our fractured language, to our splintered culture, is not merely intolerable. It is unconscionable.

No measure we take now will help Kathleen Byham. She was an American murdered by invaders whom our government refused to stop. She was an American with hopes, with dreams, with family members who loved her, who had every legal right to be where she was and to do what she was doing. She did not deserve to be killed by a piece of human filth who barely speaks English and who has no business being in the United States.

But Kathleen is still dead, and her murderer is still an alien, and it remains to be seen if we will do anything at all about either fact.